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Jul 29 2007
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What Becomes a Small Business Brand?

Small business owners are often confused about the term brand, and rightly so. Big businesses obsess about this thing called branding, yet I think on the whole it has become a pretty souless term.

Every small business has a brand? The question is whether the make-up of the brand is created intentionally or accidentally. There is little doubt in my mind that small businesses that find themselves in possession of what some would call a strong brand are far more likely to achieve great things than those that simply go our there and compete. But, a small business brand is so much more complicated than a tagline, colors or logos, a small business brand is everything the business does and has done, much like a biography – or in this case maybe a brandography.

There is this wonderful line in the book Divisadero by Michael Ondaatje that gets at this for individuals.

“Everything is biographical, Lucian Freud says. Why we make, why we draw a dog, who it is we are drawn to, why we cannot forget. Everything is collage, even genetics. There is the hidden presence of others in us. We contain them for the rest of our lives, at every border we cross.”

A small business brand is very much like this collage – made up of who the owner is, who the customers are, what the employees say, what the press says, and who you had lunch with today – in your business, everything is brandographical!

So the question is, if you knew that in every action your business took you were in the process of creating a brand, if you were given the chance to create a strong brand through your actions – would that change how you viewed your business, would you write your brandography with intention?

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Filed Under: Branding
  • http://www.guides.zammitmarketing.com Cassandra Goodwin

    Brandography – what an awesome term! Mind if I use it, with all due credit of course.

  • http://karlgoldfield.blogspot.com Karl Goldfield

    Nice blurb. It takes me back to “Hug Your Customers” by Jack Mitchell. A grat read and the bottom line is go tht extra mile for the customer and you will build a brand that everyine respects. I try and institute this philosophy in all of my proffesional actions. This is a sure fire way to build equity in my personal brand. If the people around me are infected by it, the company thrives.

    All the best,

    Karl Goldfield
    Coaching sales champions
    http://karlgoldfield.blogspot.com

  • http://www.invesp.com/blog Khalid Hajsaleh

    Hi John,

    Excellent post. I think many small business owners are so focused on their day to day business that many times they lose sight of the big picture. I have to make a call in couple of hours to a customer who was not happy with some of the results he received from us. Although we invested so much time and effort into his work. After reading this post, I am even more motivated to go out of my way to make sure that he is satisfied with. Every action is a step towards building a brand.

    Khalid

  • http://www.staged4more.com cindy@staged4more

    hi

    this is an interesting post. as a small business owner, i know about branding but really never get a chance to really develop it since there are so much other things that i need to attend to. (i am a company of 1!) additionally, it was such an exciting moment to roll the business out, there was really no time to develop the branding. now i am 1.5 years into it, i am very aware of it since the company and clients are growing. i feel it’s time to change the image a little bit into something more matured and sophisticated since i and my design has matured. i also don’t want to be branded like a corporate brand. after all, it is a small business, it’s my small business. how i do my business is very personal and i want my company to reflect that.

    but now i am a little troubled. i have chose not to use my name as the company name and i feel that since i do all the design work (i am a stager staging homes for sale), all the client contacts are through me, it makes me ponder if there is a difference and is it better that i market the company as “me,” or as my company name “staged4more?”

    cheers,

    cindy

  • http://www.personalbrandmarketing.com Vikram Rajan

    As the U.S. Census shows, 78% of small-businesses are self-employed… and growing leaps and bounds. Thus, most of our brands are personal.

    A personal brand reputation is a combination of Competency + Character + Charisma, focused on the target market Community. The power of that brand is developed through marketing Communications (duh; or else nobody knows how great we are)! We can showcase our distinctiveness in all 5 areas.

    To become conscious personal brand marketers, we must be focused on the “WIIFM” perspective of our Community, fans, prospects, or Clients.

    Who said to the effect, “It’s more important to be interestED in others, than to be interestING to others”?

    Afterall, “nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”

    That’s what our personal brand marketing should be about: It’s the “David” advantage we all have to the “Goliath” brands out there!

    ~ Vikram
    PersonalBrandMarketing.com

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  • http://pr.typepad.com John Cass

    Brand as a word means many different things to people. It is difficult sometimes to define the word. I think concrete examples can help. I recall I heard about a restaurant where the schedule management was so excellent that the restaurant made sure that all of the food was delivered individually by wait staff at the precisely the same time. Imagine 12 plates arriving at the same time. Customers remember that experience and pass it onto friends. That’s brand to me.

  • John Jantsch

    John, I agree – it’s those little things that cause people to talk, hard to measure sometimes, that make up a small business brand – but, the good news is that I think with a little intention, you can create these.

  • http://artworks4women.blogspot.com/ Jane

    I hate branding, but I believe in identity. There’s a difference- one just evolves the other is seered in.

    Think cattle. But as teeny tiny business that just unoffically adopted a cute worm as our identity…perhaps I am a fool.

  • Srini

    There is this zone that falls in between the notion of Identity and the notion of Brand. From the perspective of an individual this zone could be termed Faceted Identity, i.e. we are all multi-faceted individuals and in each facet we have a seemingly complete identity, yet the composite is more than just the sum of the parts. From the perspective of a company each employee that interacts with the outside world is a facet of the company, and hopefully the company’s value is more than just the sum of the individuals.

    Being able to “show that you care” is very much the goal of relationship-based marketing. If you can creatively manage this in each facet of the business, you can get the most leverage from the Brand. For small businesses, I guess you could call this a Micro-Brand?

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  • http://www.rampcreative.com Rachel

    Branding is such a vague term and is the new the catch phrase, but you’re right on. A business brand is embedded in every touch point the customer has with the business, just like an identity but more like a personality. It’s what makes a business unique. It’s reflected in the integrity of the stationery from a business letter to the quality of uniforms that representatives wear, and much more. To you know your small business is not like any other, that the business is as unique as you are, and to let the world know, is “branding”.

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  • http://www.threerooms.com Brandorama

    I totally agree John just look at all the brand identity theory by Kapferer and Ellwood. These theories can be applied to small, medium and large brands and still have the same results. Like John said, by looking at the history, culture, aesthetics, personality and internal/external stakeholders the brand image can be established – therefore campaigns and strategies can be initiated.

    It is a scary thought but everything and everybody, whether a political party, soft drink, emergency services can be considered as brands!

    Threerooms
    http://www.threerooms.com

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  • http://www.shoestringbranding.com ShoestringBranding

    Great insights… the important thing is to create all our branding signals “intentionally”. For that, we must first have a clear brand idea (what we want our brand to stand for). Once we know that, we can go ahead and project all the right signals. The key is to not let them to chance.

  • http://www.bigbusinessclub.com Michael Silvester

    Mi Mate,

    Great post mate! I think that 96.7%
    of Small Business out there have a
    brand that just sort of evolved.

    All you have to do is sit down and
    plan how you want things to go.

    Take Care,

    Michael Silvester

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